By ADAM ENTOUS and DANNY YADRON
President Barack
Obama announced two
years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the
world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs.
But behind the scenes, the
White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and
former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin
Netanyahu.
The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms
agreement with Iran at
the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that
inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield
at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign
against the deal to
Capitol Hill.
The National Security
Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents
of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish
groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that
the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
White House officials
believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr.
Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically
risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let
the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t
say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Stepped-up NSA
eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers
had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying
operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with
Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it
would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials
familiar with the intercepts.
Before former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden exposed much
of the agency’s spying operations in 2013, there was little worry in the
administration about the monitoring of friendly heads of state because it was such
a closely held secret. After the revelations and a White House review, Mr. Obama
announced in a January 2014 speech he would curb such eavesdropping.
In closed-door debate, the Obama administration weighed
which allied leaders belonged on a so-called protected list, shielding them
from NSA snooping. French President François
Hollande, German
Chancellor Angela
Merkel and other North
Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders made the list, but the administration
permitted the NSA to target the leaders’ top advisers, current and former U.S.
officials said. Other allies were excluded from the protected list, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of NATO ally Turkey, which
allowed the NSA to spy on their communications at the discretion of top officials.
Privately, Mr. Obama
maintained the monitoring of Mr. Netanyahu on the grounds that it served a
“compelling national security purpose,” according to current and former U.S.
officials. Mr. Obama mentioned the exception in his speech but kept secret the leaders
it would apply to.
Israeli, German and French
government officials declined to comment on NSA activities. Turkish officials
didn’t respond to requests Tuesday for comment. The Office of the Director of
National Intelligence and the NSA declined to comment on communications
provided to the White House.
This account,
stretching over two terms of the Obama administration, is based on interviews
with more than two dozen current and former U.S. intelligence and
administration officials and reveals for the first time the extent of American
spying on the Israeli prime minister.
Taking
office
After Mr. Obama’s 2008
presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials gave his national-security
team a one-page questionnaire on priorities. Included on the form was a box
directing intelligence agencies to focus on “leadership intentions,” a category
that relies on electronic spying to monitor world leaders.
The NSA was so proficient at
monitoring heads of state that it was common for the agency to deliver a visiting
leader’s talking points to the president in advance. “Who’s going to look at
that box and say, ‘No, I don’t want to know what world leaders are saying,’ ” a
former Obama administration official said.
In early intelligence
briefings, Mr. Obama and his top advisers were told what U.S. spy agencies
thought of world leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu, who at the time headed the
opposition Likud party.
Michael Hayden, who
led the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency during the George
W. Bush administration,
described the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and Israel as “the
most combustible mixture of intimacy and caution that we have.”
The NSA helped Israel
expand its electronic spy apparatus—known as signals intelligence—in the late
1970s. The arrangement gave Israel access to the communications of its regional
enemies, information shared with the U.S. Israel’s spy chiefs later suspected
the NSA was tapping into their systems.
When Mr. Obama took office,
the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200, worked together against shared
threats, including a campaign to sabotage centrifuges for Iran’s nuclear
program. At the same time, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies targeted
one another, stoking tensions.
“Intelligence professionals
have a saying: There are no friendly intelligence services,” said Mike Rogers, former Republican chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee.
Early in the Obama presidency,
for example, Unit 8200 gave the NSA a hacking tool the NSA later discovered
also told Israel how the Americans used it. It wasn’t the only time the NSA
caught Unit 8200 poking around restricted U.S. networks. Israel would say
intrusions were accidental, one former U.S. official said, and the NSA would
respond, “Don’t worry. We make mistakes, too.”
In 2011 and 2012, the aims of Messrs. Netanyahu and Obama
diverged over Iran. Mr. Netanyahu
prepared for a possible strike against an Iranian nuclear facility, as Mr.
Obama pursued secret talks with
Tehran without telling Israel.
Convinced Mr.
Netanyahu would attack Iran without warning the White House, U.S. spy agencies
ramped up their surveillance, with the assent of Democratic and Republican
lawmakers serving on congressional intelligence committees.
By 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies
determined Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t going to strike Iran. But they had another
reason to keep watch. The White House wanted to know if Israel had learned of
the secret negotiations. U.S. officials feared Iran would bolt the talks and
pursue an atomic bomb if news leaked.
The NSA had, in some cases,
spent decades placing electronic implants in networks around the world to
collect phone calls, text messages and emails. Removing them or turning them
off in the wake of the Snowden revelations would make it difficult, if not
impossible, to re-establish access in the future, U.S. intelligence officials
warned the White House.
Instead of removing the
implants, Mr. Obama decided to shut off the NSA’s monitoring of phone numbers
and email addresses of certain allied leaders—a move that could be reversed by
the president or his successor.
There was little debate over
Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S.
official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.
One tool was a cyber implant
in Israeli networks that gave the NSA access to communications within the
Israeli prime minister’s office.
Given the appetite for
information about Mr. Netanyahu’s intentions during the U.S.-Iran negotiations,
the NSA tried to send updates to U.S. policy makers quickly, often in less than
six hours after a notable communication was intercepted, a former official
said.
Emerging
deal
NSA intercepts convinced the White House last year that Israel was spying on negotiations under way in Europe. Israeli officials later denied targeting U.S. negotiators,
saying they had won access to U.S. positions by spying only on the Iranians.
By late 2014, White House
officials knew Mr. Netanyahu wanted to block the emerging nuclear deal but
didn’t know how.
On Jan. 8, John
Boehner, then the
Republican House Speaker, and incoming Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell agreed on a plan. They would invite Mr. Netanyahu to deliver a speech
to a joint session of Congress. A day later, Mr. Boehner
called Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador, to get Mr. Netanyahu’s agreement.
Despite NSA surveillance,
Obama administration officials said they were caught off guard when Mr. Boehner
announced the invitation on Jan. 21.
Soon after, Israel’s lobbying
campaign against the deal went into full swing on Capitol Hill, and it didn’t
take long for administration and intelligence officials to realize the NSA was
sweeping up the content of conversations with lawmakers.
The message to the NSA from
the White House amounted to: “You decide” what to deliver, a former
intelligence official said.
NSA rules
governing intercepted communications “to, from or about” Americans date back to
the Cold War and
require obscuring the identities of U.S. individuals and U.S. corporations. An
American is identified only as a “U.S. person” in intelligence reports; a U.S.
corporation is identified only as a “U.S. organization.” Senior U.S. officials
can ask for names if needed to understand the intelligence information.
The rules were
tightened in the early 1990s to require that intelligence agencies inform
congressional committees when a lawmaker’s name was revealed to the executive
branch in summaries of intercepted communications.
A 2011 NSA directive said
direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of
Congress should be destroyed when they are intercepted. But the NSA director
can issue a waiver if he determines the communications contain “significant
foreign intelligence.”
The NSA has leeway to collect
and disseminate intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers if, for
example, foreign ambassadors send messages to their foreign ministries that
recount their private meetings or phone calls with members of Congress, current
and former officials said.
“Either way, we got the same
information,” a former official said, citing detailed reports prepared by the
Israelis after exchanges with lawmakers.
During Israel’s lobbying
campaign in the months before the deal cleared Congress in September, the NSA
removed the names of lawmakers from intelligence reports and weeded out
personal information. The agency kept out “trash talk,” officials said, such as
personal attacks on the executive branch.
Administration and
intelligence officials said the White House didn’t ask the NSA to identify any
lawmakers during this period.
“From what I can tell, we
haven’t had a problem with how incidental collection has been handled
concerning lawmakers,” said Rep. Adam
Schiff, a California Democrat and
the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He
declined to comment on any specific communications between lawmakers and
Israel.
The NSA reports allowed
administration officials to peer inside Israeli efforts to turn Congress
against the deal. Mr. Dermer was described as coaching unnamed U.S.
organizations—which officials could tell from the context were Jewish-American
groups—on lines of argument to use with lawmakers, and Israeli officials were
reported pressing lawmakers to oppose the deal.
“These allegations are total
nonsense,” said a spokesman for the Embassy of Israel in Washington.
A U.S. intelligence official
familiar with the intercepts said Israel’s pitch to undecided lawmakers often
included such questions as: “How can we get your vote? What’s it going to
take?”
NSA intelligence reports
helped the White House figure out which Israeli government officials had leaked
information from confidential U.S. briefings. When confronted by the U.S.,
Israel denied passing on the briefing materials.
The agency’s goal was “to
give us an accurate illustrative picture of what [the Israelis] were doing,” a
senior U.S. official said.
Just before Mr. Netanyahu’s
address to Congress in March, the NSA swept up Israeli messages that raised
alarms at the White House: Mr. Netanyahu’s office wanted details from Israeli
intelligence officials about the latest U.S. positions in the Iran talks, U.S.
officials said.
A day before the speech, Secretary of State John
Kerry made an unusual
disclosure. Speaking to reporters in Switzerland, Mr. Kerry said
he was concerned Mr.
Netanyahu would divulge “selective details of the ongoing negotiations.”
The State Department said Mr.
Kerry was responding to Israeli media reports that Mr. Netanyahu wanted to use
his speech to make sure U.S. lawmakers knew the terms of the Iran deal.
Intelligence officials said
the media reports allowed the U.S. to put Mr. Netanyahu on notice without
revealing they already knew his thinking. The prime minister mentioned no
secrets during his speech to Congress.
In the final months of the
campaign, NSA intercepts yielded few surprises. Officials said the information
reaffirmed what they heard directly from lawmakers and Israeli officials
opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign—that the prime minister was focused on
building opposition among Democratic lawmakers.
The NSA intercepts, however,
revealed one surprise. Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence
they could win enough votes.